Tonight Amjad Ali Khan brought Taiwanese the first sarod concerto, Samagam, in the history. The concerto's name is of Sanskrit origin, and its meaning is “confluence”. In fact, the music construction is weak, and the orchestra has no enough music in its soul. The sense of balance therefore is bad. However, the perfect duet of sarod and tabla is as brilliant as ecstatic and likes a journey to various spaces.
In one night Qiang Zhang & Taipei Chinese Orchestra delivered two pipa concertos. Let’s talk about the Butterfly Lovers' Pipa Concerto in advance. The soloist’s music technique is very good; nevertheless, the Zhu Yingtai is played like Hua Mulan who is hurriedly sending herself in her father’s place in the army. Actually, it is a little disaster, but at last the audience was clapping loudly. Taiwanese is too kind, isn’t?
As for the Little Sisters of the Grassland Pipa Concerto, it is accompanied seamlessly by Amy Chang & TCO and performed greatly by Qiang Zhang! There are five parts of this concerto: tending sheep, fighting with the tempest, processing in the cold night, remembering the people’s kindness & blossom of red flowers, which reminded A-Mao of one event in Taiwan before……
Lu Siqing & Taipei Chinese Orchestra at the Zhongshan Hall delivered one marvelous night of violin concerto. The color of sounds of Sarasate’s Zigeunerweisen & Carmen Fantasy accompanied by TCO is a little bit weird, but Lu is a really magic virtuoso, and this brand-new experience is not bad. “Abendlied eines Fischers” (or Fishers’ Nocturne) almost made A-Mao cry not only because Lu played well but also because it is the encore piece when he was a member of the Youth Band of China Youth Corps participating in WASBE 1997 conference in Schladming, Austria, and it made the other teams stand up and clap. By the way, looking forward to WASBE 2011 conference in Chiayi, Taiwan.
Hong Kong novelist Lilian Lee wrote: This is so-called love. Among 10 million people about, there would be only one couple of Liang Zhu could be transformed into a pair of butterflies. The others would not be turned into butterflies but moths, mosquitoes, cockroaches, flies, beetles......(XD). Love is not as beautiful as you imagine. Nevertheless, the most beautiful one is Butterfly Lovers' Violin Concerto. Compared with Western orchestra version, it is far more Chinese to accompany by a Chinese orchestra—is it wordy? Lu was expressing this love legend perfectly & touchingly. And, A-Mao cried because of the romantic but sad duet of “farewell for eighteen miles” played by solo violin, Zhu Yingtai, & Principle Gehu, Liang Shanbo. In the end, the audience went crazy! There were three encores: Saint-Saens’ Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso, Monti’s Csardas & one unknown solo piece. Bravo, bravo & bravo!
Because of drum music of “Night Fight” from movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, A-Mao started being interested in Tan Dun’s work. Tonight’s overture is “Forbidden City” from the opera Marco Polo. As a composer, Mr. Tan seamlessly conducted the orchestra to his ideas of contemplation, and this piece were explaining what his philosophy of music is, western one plus eastern one is not two but one. The following is “Paper Concerto” for Paper Percussion and Orchestra. It is fantastic that paper sheet, paper screen, paper box, paper pipe, paper bag & paper umbrella as well as Chinese folding paper fan could be played as instruments. In addition, members of the orchestra can speedily change the pages of their scores to make humorous sounds. The main soloist, Haruka Fujii, performed perfectly, and TSO was accompanied her well. Then, the audience cheerfully clapped this concerto, which is better, according to my personal opinion, than wonderful “Water Concerto”.
The Map, Concerto for Cello, Video and Orchestra, reminded A-Mao of lyric of Qu Yuan’s “Nine Songs” as well as experience listening to and watching Ensemble Modern played Steve Reich’s “Different Trains”. This multimedia masterpiece contains 9 movements in 4 sections, featuring a different aspect of the traditional music of Tujia, Miao & Dong people in Hunan. The most touching movement to me is the 7th, Stone Drums, in which two stones are played with different angles to make various tones, followed by a percussion quartet of previous, the same video footage. The cello soloist, Richard Bamping, from England plays on a Guarneri and interprets Chinese music element without fail. Great performance! But it is sad that we had no encore played by the Guarneri.
Martin Fischer-Dieskau, Conductor, Alexander Baillie, Cello, & Taipei Symphony Orchestra. It is A-Mao's second time listening to live Prokofiev’s Sinfonia Concertante. The solo cellist’s performance history is incredible, and his interpretation has lots of thoughts. The first movement had several brilliant sparkles, but trill was not enough. In the second movement, the more humorous, the more excellent. The third movement, variations, was really good though the volume of some showy parts was low. The encore piece is Bouree of Bach's Cello Suite No. 4, and it was played vividly. Baillie must practice it N times, however, he made a few misses. As for TSO, frankly speaking, A-Mao is very disappointed that this orchestra accompanied the soloist perfunctorily. Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 just got a passing mark because there are many imperfections in performance.
